Planning for Bliss

Eating right while traveling for business is hard because I've got a license (in the form of an expense account) to eat out every night. Added to that is the peer pressure to try the wonderful appetizers, sample desserts, and have one more drink. There's an atmosphere of joviality which makes it really hard to say, "No, I'll just have this small (pathetic) salad while all of you are (over) indulging." In days passed, I've gone along and let the social pressure beat out my internal pressure to eat healthy.

John's heart attack was a wake up call in so many ways and one of the biggest was that I've committed to continuing my healthy habits even while traveling. I've also realized that if I'm going to be successful, I'm going to have to plan ahead and make my desire to eat healthy a higher priority than my need to be liked. The following are some tips that have helped me stay on the bliss diet while traveling:

• Pack food--Eating on the run is the number one reason that I fall into the pit of over indulgence when I travel and the only sure fire way I know to combat that is to pack food in case I'm not able to get to the grocery store. I typically throw a few cans of "soup at hand," oranges, and sometimes prepackaged salmon into my bag. That way I have portion controlled foods readily available in case I get the munchies.
• Eat in for lunch--You have to pick your battles and I've found that saying no to going out to lunch is easier for most people to accept than saying no for dinner. if I've packed a lunch, even if it is just soup and a piece of fruit, it's even easier.
• Hit the grocery store--Chattanooga, the town I travel to most, has an awesome grocery store called Green Life that has great produce, cheeses, and other tasty treats. When I'm in Chattanooga, I always head to Green Life my first day in town to pick up some goodies. I typically pick up cheese and crackers to have for breakfast, fruit, and other yummies that taste great and are healthy for me.
• Choose a hotel with a fridge and a microwave--Doubletree is an awesome hotel with big comfy beds, nice people, and a microwave and fridge in every room. Having a microwave and a fridge makes it easier to eat healthy on the road because I can store cheese and fruit in the fridge and have an easy way to heat up soup or other healthy food.
• Prepare a lunch box--One of the biggest challenges of eating healthy while on the road is making sure you have the utensils you need if you choose to stock up at the grocery store. I've created a lunch box of utensils, condiments, and other things that make it easier to prepare and eat food on the road. My lunch box has silverware, honey, a tea cup, my favorite Teavana tea, and a small cutting board that I use both as a cutting board and as a plate. I wash things out in the sink when I'm traveling. When I get home, I throw the silverware, cutting board, and cup into the dishwasher and then repack my lunch box and put it back in my suitcase so it's ready for the next trip.
• Eat room service--Room service has a bad rap as being unhealthy, but room service has one huge advantage of eating out: you typically order your entire meal at once and have it delivered so you're not presented with the menu over and over and over. I've found that it's a lot easier for me to make choices when I'm ordering all my food at once. It makes me realize that if I have the gigantic appetizer, I probably should have a smaller entree and skip the dessert. Or I could have a small entree and eat the dessert. Making the choices all at once lets me create dietary balance.
• Mix up socializing and eating alone--Despite it's ability to wreak havoc on the best laid dietary plans, eating out with the team is important because it lets you get to know your coworkers as whole people instead of just seeing the work side of their personality. If I'm traveling with the team, I'll typically go out to eat two nights and eat in the rest of the week. I'll budget my calories carefully to make sure that I have enough calories available for a little overindulgence at dinner.
• Improvisational Bliss--I usually stick some Ziploc bags in my lunch box so that I have them to store my opened cheese in. This time I forgot, but luckily the Doubletree came through for me and there were paper coffee cups with lids in my room. The worked great for storing my cheese and as a tea strainer when I forgot my special teaspoon that acts as a strainer. Since the soup was getting boring, I tried packing little cheese and cracker sandwiches in a coffee cup and popping them in my purse. They were absolutely perfect come lunch time.

Planning ahead means that I get to stay on track while I'm on the road and that creates a sense of blissful control.

Recording Bliss

One of the number one diet tips of all times is to keep a food journal and record everything that you eat. I've always failed at this for a variety of reasons: got bored, got lazy, forgot to write it down, didn't want to have to always look up the calories, etc., etc, etc. Looking back, I see that in actuality the number one reason I failed is that it was too discouraging to continually write down that I'd eaten all the right things and still not lost weight.

Since I've changed my focus to controlling the numbers that I can control and not worrying so much about the number on the scale, I've been better about actually recording everything I eat. I found an awesome site online called FatSecret that lets me track my calories online, from my Blackberry, or from my new G1. The beauty of it is that I only have to enter the food and Fat Secret tallies up the calories for me. Much better than writing it all down in a little notebook and then having to get out a fat book of calories to tally everything up.

The ability to enter my foods on the go and know all the time how much of my caloric balance I have left is tremendous and it goes a long way toward keeping me honest. Not every food I eat is in there, but there is always something that is close. For instance, the Nicole's English Toffee cookies that I'm addicted to aren't listed, but there are English Toffee cookies listed and I can manipulate the serving size to reach the calories that I know are in the cookies I eat. You can also enter your own foods, but when I'm doing it from my phone, it's just as easy to go for close enough. Close enough isn't perfection, but getting close enough is way better than not entering the foods in at at all or waiting until I have time to sit down and get to perfection. If I waited for perfection, I probably wouldn't get the foods logged at all.

There are days when I am seriously tempted to "forget" to log something that I ate because I know it will push me over my caloric limit for the day, but then I remember that this log is really all about me and that it isn't being kept for some calorie counter in the sky. The only person that I will hurt by cheating on my diet log is me and I'm tired of hurting me through overeating, stress, and all the other ways I (like most modern women) abuse myself. If there is only one person in the world that I'm honest with, it should be me so I'll suck it up and feel the self love as I record absolutely everything that I eat.

Bliss of Perserverance

It's been over a year since my Daddy died and a lot of that year has been spent worrying about my mom. She'd been with my dad since she was 16 years old and she never really lived on her own before. Dad made sure the house was taken care of, negotiated deals for new cars, and took care of other details of their life together.

One of the hardest moments of my life was in the funeral home the morning my dad died. He was being cremated, but my mom wanted to see him one last time so she asked the funeral director if that was possible. They brought my dad out on a gurney covered in a white sheet and my mother hugged him one last time and cried saying that she didn't know how she'd go on. I took the funeral director aside and asked him if it would be possible to get a clip of my dad's hair because my mother had loved how distinguished and silver his hair had turned. He obliged and made sure my mother got that lock of hair.

Ironically, the day my daddy died, my mom's car gave out and she was almost overwhelmed by the thought of planning daddy's funeral and arranging for a car. My brother and I looked at each other and knew that the vultures would be circling the new widow in desperate need of a car. We tried hard to convince her to wait because we knew that emotionally she was in no state to deal with the paperwork that a new car would entail and we knew that she had neighbors who would make sure she was taken care of even if we couldn't be there. She insisted that she needed the car that day so I headed out to shop with her to ensure that she was not totally ripped off. She did fine up until she saw the paperwork with just her name on it and then the realization that the man she'd spent over 40 years with was gone, hit her and she broke down.

The past year has been more difficult for my mother than she's let on and there have been days when she has wanted to crawl under the covers, but she has perservered. She's learned, she's grown, and she's made a new life for herself. She's volunteering at a Federal Fish and Wildllife facility by my daddy's beloved Mississippi. A big part of her job is introducing kids to the wonders of nature and while she's teaching them, she's learning about he diversity of life in her area.

She's also working and helping take care of the elderly and making sure that there last days are filled with kindness. The site of my dad laying under the cold white sheet was almost more than she could bear, so she's decided to make small quilts that the funeral home can use in place of the white sheet to give people a little dignity and make it a little easier for people to see their loved ones at the funeral home.

My mother has also gotten serious about losing weight because, as she puts it, she no longer has the excuse that she's cooking for someone else so she's watching what she eats and she's walking at least a mile every day. This summer she took us out to the area that she walks in and I was amazed by the steep hills that she regularlly climbed.

My daddy will always be a huge part of my mother's life as she lived with him and loved him for over 40 years, but I'm incredibly proud of her for perservering and building a new and very meaningful life for herself.

Bliss of Self Acceptance

Growing up I felt like I never fit in: I was never cool enough, I was never pretty enough, I never had enough money. I always felt like a second class citizen as if all the other kids were prettier, smarter, and richer than I was. My brains also created a rift between me and the neighborhood kids as I always quickly grasped concepts that other kids struggled with. All these factors, combined with my lack of self acceptance, led me to be bullied and picked on by the other kids.

The lack of self acceptance carried through to college where I wanted nothing more than to be one of the cool kids. I wanted to be liked for my looks and my bubbly personality, not my brains. I went to parties on campus, but I'd grown up fairly sheltered so most of the jokes really did go right over my head.

Marriage came quickly and motherhood soon there after. I still never felt like I quite fit in as if everyone had more money than I did, better social skills, and was just better in every way. I never took the time to sit down and analyze the facts, I just made assumptions that always cast me in a bad light. As when I'd been a child, I downplayed my strengths, but was always willing to shed a spotlight on my deficiencies.

It's only been in the last five years or so that I've started to feel comfortable in my own skin and with my own life. John and I aren't millionaires, but we have a nice house in a safe neighborhood and we make as much or more as our peers. I'm not a beauty queen, but I'm working hard to lose weight and improve my appearance and that has to count for something. I'm smart and clever and I try to be a nice person and to help others when I can.

And those brains that I tried so hard to hide when I was younger are coming in very heavy in this dog eat dog job market where my brains and ability to think on my feet and communicate with all levels of management are earning me jobs I never thought possible. I'm also learning, the hard way, that everyone has their foibles and quirks and that there really no perfect people out there.

Accepting yourself for your faults and straights is incredible hard and there are days when I'm still not sure I like who I am, but I just keep getting up every morning and looking for all the characteristics that make me uniquely perfect.